An Arizona driver’s license issued after 1996, a U.S. birth certificate, a passport or other similar document is required to vote in federal elections in Arizona. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday on the state’s Proposition 200 law.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court will struggle this week with the validity of an Arizona law that tries to keep illegal immigrants from voting by demanding that all state residents show documents proving their U.S. citizenship before registering to vote in national elections.

The court will hear arguments Monday over the legality of Arizona’s voter-approved requirement that prospective voters document their U.S. citizenship in order to use a registration form produced under the federal “Motor Voter” voter-registration law that doesn’t require such documentation.

This case focuses on voter registration in Arizona, which has tangled frequently with the federal government over immigration issues involving the Mexican border. But it has broader implications. Four other states — Alabama, Georgia, Kansas and Tennessee — have similar requirements, and 12 other states are contemplating similar legislation, officials say.

The Obama administration is supporting challengers to the law.

If Arizona can add citizenship requirements, then “each state could impose all manner of its own supplemental requirements beyond the federal form,” said Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. in court papers. “Those requirements could encompass voluminous documentary or informational demands, and could extend to any eligibility criteria beyond citizenship, such as age, residency, mental competence, or felony history.”

A federal appeals court threw out the part of Arizona’s Proposition 200 that added extra citizenship requirements for voter registration, but only after lower federal judges had approved it.

Arizona wants the justices to reinstate its requirement.

Kathy McKee, who led the push to get the proposition on the ballot, said voter fraud, including by illegal immigrants, continues to be a problem in Arizona. “For people to conclude there is no problem is just shallow logic,” McKee said.

Noncitizens on the rolls

Officials in pivotal presidential-election states last year found a fraction of the illegal voters they initially suspected had existed.

In Colorado, election officials found 141 noncitizens on the voter rolls, which was 0.004 percent of the state’s nearly 3.5 million voters.

Florida officials found 207, or 0.001 percent of the state’s 11.4 million registered voters. In North Carolina, 79 people admitted to election officials that they weren’t citizens and were removed from the rolls, along with 331 others who didn’t respond to repeated inquires.

Opponents of Arizona’s law see it as an attack on vulnerable voter groups such as minorities, immigrants and the elderly. They say Arizona’s law makes registering more difficult, which is an opposite result from the intention of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act.

Proposition 200 “was never intended to combat voter fraud,” said Democratic state Sen. Steve Gallardo of Phoenix. “It was intended to keep minorities from voting.”

With the additional state documentation requirements, Arizona will cripple the effectiveness of neighborhood and community voter-registration drives, some people say. More than 28 million Americans used the federal “Motor Voter” form to register to vote in the 2008 presidential elections, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

An Arizona victory at the high court would lead to more state voting restrictions, said Elisabeth MacNamara, the national president of the League of Women Voters.

Opponents of the Arizona provision say they have counted more than 31,000 potentially legal voters in Arizona who easily could have registered before Proposition 200 but who were blocked initially by the law in the 20 months after it passed in 2004. They say about 20 percent of those thwarted were Latino.

Arizona officials say they should be able to pass laws to stop illegal immigrants and other noncitizens from getting on their voting rolls. The Arizona voting law was part of a package that also denied some government benefits to illegal immigrants and required Arizonans to show identification before voting.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the voter-identification provision. The denial of benefits was not challenged.

State law vs. federal law

The federal “Motor Voter” law, enacted in 1993 to expand voter registration, allows would-be voters to fill out a mail-in voter-registration card and swear they are citizens under penalty of perjury, but it doesn’t require them to show proof.

Under Proposition 200, Arizona officials require an Arizona driver’s license issued after 1996, a U.S. birth certificate, a passport or other similar document, or the state will reject the federal registration application form.

The main legal question facing the justices is whether the federal law trumps Arizona’s law. A 10-member panel of the 9th Circuit in San Francisco said it did.

The appeals court issued multiple rulings in this case, with a three-judge panel initially siding with Arizona. A second panel that included retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who from time to time sits on appeals courts, reversed course and blocked the registration requirement. The full court then did the same, and that decision will be reviewed by the justices in Washington.

Using data from the Dartmouth Atlas – a source of information and analytics that organizes Medicare data by a variety of indicators linked to medical resource use – we recently ranked geographic areas based on markers of end-of-life care quality, including deaths in the hospital and number of physicians seen in the last year of life.

Wednesday morning two independent research teams, one based in the Netherlands and the other in California, reported that the deluge from Hurricane Harvey was significantly heavier than it would have been before the era of human-caused global warming.

Denver’s newest skyscraper will be home to one of the city’s most recognizable home-grown business by the end of next year. Chipotle is moving its 450 downtown corporate staff into the 1144 Fifteenth tower by the end of 2018.